Yes, Descent. Also known as Lazy Man's D&D. A good old fashioned Dungeon Bash with no planning or set-up required.
For those that haven't played it, you create a dungeon for each quest from a series of modular tiles. One player is the Evil Overlord - think Sauron, Randall Flagg or Margret Thatcher - and the other players control heroes. Each hero has a class and career and spends XP to gain new abilities as well as new equipment. For your money you get a lot of stuff. I mean, a lot of stuff. And all very high quality.
That's about less than a third of the stuff, by the way.
There are around 25 quests in the base game and last night we played the first two. I was elected as Overlord - fairly predictably - and The Good Lady Er Indoors and a wandering RS teacher (lord, random encounter tables have really gone downhill) as the mighty heroes.
Look, I'm going to cut to the chase of this little mini-review. Descent is great. It deserves a place on your table. In two hours we had more drama, laughter and stupidity that you normally get in a month's worth of RPG sessions. Including but not limited to:
-The goblin archers being so distracted by the Cleric's manly ass they were unable to shoot him
-The same cleric getting bitten in the same ass by a spider
-A dwarf being thrown across the dungeon by an ettin only to waddle back and smack the ettin into next week
-and, glory of glories - a TPK:
Of course, the joy of Descent: like Jaws in a Roger Moore Bond movie, they pick themselves up and dust themselves off ready for the next adventure.
We'll be playing some more next week. If there's any interest I'll do a proper write up/review explaining how the game plays and so forth.
